Can't Write Home
by sing-oldsongs
Summary: The author reads On the Road. Sirius and Remus take a trip. Remus makes a discovery. 1950s America AU. Sirius x Remus.
A/N: Written in 2009 for the R/S Games, Team AU. I chose the word prompt for violet, which was spirit/spirituality.

 **x**

They reached the Mississippi just as the day was fading out in one last burst of draining dark red color over the water and Remus had felt his very breath leave him at the beauty of it. He'd never been this far west in his life. He made an effort to hide his excitement, in case Sirius should find it funny.

It's proper dark now and they've found a patch of grass beneath a great eternity of sky; maybe later they'll leave and find someplace to stay but probably not because neither of them has much money left and it's a long way still across that sweeping expanse of land to California. Remus is fine here. He's using one of his shirts for a pillow and resting his hands on his stomach just so he can feel his body expand and deflate with his own breath. He glances over at Sirius and sees he's staring up at the sky, too, just staring, very still. Remus finds himself thinking that, maybe, Sirius is trustworthy after all.

They've known each other only a few months, but it feels like longer. Even the evenings are hot with summer now but the ground was frozen and the tree branches weighed down with snow and all the streets slushy with it when Sirius first showed up in Remus's English class and all the rumors started. People who knew people who knew him said he'd been a student at the University before but he'd spent the last year in prison, no one sure on what offense. Or, more precisely, everyone was sure but of a different story so that this fellow, this Sirius Black, became more a pathwork than a person, a collection of stories, hypotheses, apocrypha. Sometimes Remus caught him staring across the room, never bothering to hide his gaze even when Remus dared to meet it.

Early February, they started meeting after class, leaning against the cold brick wall of the humanities building, sharing cigarettes, debating the books they read for class and the professor's methods. One day in not-quite-spring Sirius showed up at Remus's door. He had dinner with him and his parents; Mrs. Lupin found him charming and polite, told Remus so later after Sirius had left and he was left staring out the window after him and wondering when he told this strange boy where he lived.

Sirius has closed his eyes but he's not sleeping; Remus watches him, glad Sirius can't see him staring, wondering at the same time how he can dare to close his eyes to this. The grass beneath him pricks at his bare arms. The ground is uneven dirt beneath the green and he can feel each slope and rise of it beneath his back. Remus is only half a person and he's known it his whole life, missing something he can't tell what, sure that he should be someone else or somewhere else. Some nights with Sirius, riding the bus around the city or walking through sidestreets or holed up in Sirius's cheap and crummy apartment with all the windows closed and the air heavy with smoke, some nights he thinks that he's found it. The next day it feels like an illusion. All of it, everything.

Sirius, beside him, is talking about California again.

"When we get to California," he's saying, which is how he always starts. He's been saying this for months, even before they first planned this trip, before Remus agreed to go anywhere with him. They both knew that he would, when Sirius finally got around to asking. "When we get to California we'll look up James, first thing. He's been out there for a couple years already so he knows all the things to do and places to see. Imagine those words all in capitals: that's how I mean them. James always knows everybody so he'll introduce us to the whole crowd and then we can really go on some adventures. Then we can really see things how they are."

Sirius talks a lot about seeing things how they are. He doesn't talk about real or illusion, reality or fantasy, no words like that, that's not what he means, but it's how Remus sees it, how he translates Sirius's thoughts to himself. What's funny is that nothing seems real with Sirius. Or it feels hyper-real, the landscape as it rushes by bus windows or car windows like something out of a film or a book, so realistic it's breathtaking because he knows it's imaginary, just out of his reach, just beyond his ability to touch and believe. Next to him, Sirius takes a deep breath. Remus watches the shadow of his body fill with a grand sweep of heavy night air, then fall down again. There's an almost full moon above them and in its light Remus feels wide awake and ready for anything. A weird excitement radiates from Sirius and fills him, and he's thinking about California, yes, San Francisco is where they'll start because James is there; and Lily, his sweet red-headed girlfriend that Sirius has never met but says he's seen in the pictures James sends; and Peter, who lost part of his left ring finger in 44; and Benjy, who holes up in his rooms all day writing scripts to send to Hollywood; and the Prewett brothers, who Sirius first met when they were living in Texas, the ones who taught him so much but he won't say what; and Marlene, who still owns the car that took her all the way from New York to San Francisco in a record time even Sirius will admit he could never beat. And James will know all the Things to Do and Places to See and Remus will have the sort of experiences one Can't Write Home About because no one will ever believe him anyway.

"James and Peter and them," Sirius is saying now, glancing over at Remus for a moment, then shifting so his arms stretch above him and then curl behind, crossed behind his head, "they know. You know? They know what it's like to be different like we are."

"Different?" Remus asks, keeping his voice real steady, cool. "I don't know, Sirius. I'm pretty ordinary." Sighs a little at that, hidden sound behind the chirping of crickets, the echo of a train in the distance, the sound building and falling somewhere beyond them. Sirius doesn't answer for a long time. Remus thinks the conversation has dropped, like conversation does between them, picks up and drops again like nothing.

He thinks he hears Sirius whisper lightly, "You don't know, then." But it could be nothing. Remus stares up at the stars that fill the whole of his vision and lets himself get lost in them, something like floating, and he could be anywhere in the world now, it feels like.

Then Sirius tells him, "Close your eyes." His voice has such strength and authority that Remus does, unquestioning.

He hears Sirius moving next to him. When he opens his eyes again, under Sirius's order, he sees that Sirius has moved closer to him across the grass and lifted his body up on one elbow and that he's staring down at Remus's face, to catch the expression on his face perhaps. His other hand is held just below Remus's face, palm up. In the middle, a cluster of blue flames flicker brightly.

Remus looks down into the heart of the flame. Then he meets Sirius's eye again. He can't read the expression there, hidden in the dark planes and shifting shadows and illuminated patches of his face as it's lit by the small fire in his hand.

Remus's life was dull before Sirius swept into it. That's the truth as plain and bold as he can make it. He holds out his hand when Sirius tells him to. He doesn't flinch when Sirius lets the flame catch his palm, and he's not surprised to find it doesn't burn.

He finds that he's holding his breath so he releases it, a bit uneasy and hitching, just as Sirius presses his hand into a fist and opens it again, clean and unburned, empty. Then he reaches for Remus's hand, and curls it around itself in the same gesture, Sirius's skin still hot against Remus's, breath hitching again, and when Sirius lets go he uncurls his hand and his palm is, as Sirius's, bare and clear.

"I can teach you," Sirius is saying, "how to channel it. It's in you, it is, just ready for you to find it and use it and manipulate it and what you'll be able to do with it, I just want to know. All the time we're figuring new things out. Something about you I just knew you could do it too. Let me show you let me show you _everything_."

Sirius's voice runs along smooth and almost without pause, a bit faster and a bit faster until all his words sort of string together and Remus feels dizzy with them and closes his eyes to stop everything spinning. Later maybe he'll wake up and it will all be a dream, no more real than San Francisco, a golden city at the end of a long and weary and trampled down old road that bridges a contintent too massive for comprehension. Maybe it's the land itself, he thinks, yes, this, that has made him so faint.

Sirius is silent now, leaning above him. Remus opens his eyes.

"Just tell me what it is," he says. "What you're talking about, what is it?"

The way Sirius is looking at him, it makes him nervous, makes his stomach tie all up in knots. He's been ignoring for days, for longer really, for all the weeks they've known each other, these feelings he's not supposed to have, but they're welling up now sudden and scary. He keeps his eyes open anyway, just staring into Sirius's like he can scare him too, like maybe if he stares long enough he'll get his answers.

"I call it the spirit," Sirius says. "But I don't know really."

 _That young man_ , Remus's mother had said, after dinner, Remus staring out the window, at his own reflection in the black of the window, _that young man, he has spirit. That's what I think. A real and honest and open spirit_.

Remus knows suddenly and with fierce certainty that she was right, and so is Sirius, now, equally right, and that the fire he held in his hand has been burning inside him all along.

He knows this and he's not scared, and he's not scared either when Sirius kisses him. It is a long and slow and careful kiss. When Sirius pulls away he's grinning. Remus's hands are gripping hard at his hips to keep him close.

"What it will be like," Sirius whispers, tense hoarse whisper like sharing a secret, "what it will be like is like knowing the whole world," and he could be talking about sex or love or spirit or just California again, Remus doesn't know. It doesn't matter. He whispers it again in thin careful echo:

"It will be like knowing the whole world."


End file.
